The company said QuickBooks Checking – which combines a variety of services that fintechs currently provide small businesses into one core offering – has signed up more than 150,000 small businesses since it was unveiled. Since January, one-third of all the customers to adopt the platform have been small businesses with less than one year of operations, and the customer base has grown four times as large. “Thousands of small businesses are turning to QuickBooks Checking to manage their cash flow, and we’re laser-focused on continuing to refine and design an even more robust banking experience with their specific needs in mind,” said Rania Succar, senior vice president of QuickBooks Money Offerings. “A banking solution that’s seamlessly integrated with the QuickBooks platform accelerates our ability to deliver tremendous benefits to small businesses and support them with complete visibility of and fast access to their money, all with total reliability.” QuickBooks Checking aims to remove outdated money movement barriers and help small businesses better understand and predict finances with the help of machine learning. Intuit said the product offers a high-yield interest rate, a fund budgeting tool called Envelopes, and machine-learning powered insights that help predict cash flows. The business account includes free instant deposit and a physical debit card that lets businesses spend from their QuickBooks Checking balance. The product also includes a cash flow dashboard that shows how much money is flowing in and out of the business. Using machine learning, the system analyzes financial inputs to predict a business’s cash flow needs over the next 90 days and alerts business owners when cash flow concerns might come up. QuickBooks Checking integrates across the QuickBooks Online platform, including its payments, payroll and core accounting services. Overall the aim is to remove traditional money movement latencies and costs for businesses, Intuit said. So far, businesses have shown the most interest in the platform’s Cash Flow Planner and Envelopes, a tool that allows companies to partition money for future expenditures. The tool is used by many small businesses to cover things like Sales tax and other costs that will come down the line. Intuit said that because of the interest in the feature, they will be rolling out a Sales Tax Automation feature that uses machine learning to streamline the process. The company also plans to debut mobile check deposit features in the coming weeks, as well as a virtual debit card.
